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Music Pick: Fall Forward

“Ersatz G.B.,” out this week, is the Fall’s twenty-ninth album, performed by what seems like its thousandth incarnation, and it’s more of the same, in a sense: Mark E. Smith’s brilliant grumbling, heard over jagged riffs that sound random at first and hypnotic soon enough. This album is slightly more straightforward in its approach to rock and roll, which means that songs like “Monocard” and “Greenway” come close to heavy metal; in a recent column, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote that “Smith has, over the years, steered his band toward a heavier and more truculent sound.” But there are also confounding ballads (“Taking Off”), along with a half-dozen other songs that are angry, gnomic, brilliant, and difficult, particularly lyrically: Frere-Jones wrote that “the world flows through Mark E. Smith’s lyrics, in all their venom and wonder.”

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